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Magento Go Review – Sucking Support & $99 Ripoff for SSL Setup

I officially signed up with Magento Go‘s Going Places plan for $25 / month and paid $99 for my SSL to be installed. It’s been 3 days and I wish I had better things to say about them.

And this is my review.

Uptime: 4.7 / 5

It’s too early to tell because I’m only with them for 10 days (in trial for 7 days). Sometimes it’s a bit slow. Magento is known to be resource-intensive. But as of now, Magento Go has been constantly up and responsive for me.

Price: 2.5 / 5

I would have given them 5 / 5 if I don’t have to pay $99 for my SSL to be installed – yes, that’s JUST for the installation service, not the SSL. You have to provide your own SSL certificate purchased from a CA to them. And this didn’t turn out to be very pleasant. I’ll come to that later.

The $1 million stimulus package that they promised to discount the monthly subscription fee by $15 for a year hasn’t been activated for me – and I contacted them about this twice – got NO responses of any kind. Waited nearly 24 hours and still no emails. So I logged back in to see the tickets. You know what I found? The tickets are all DELETED, like it’s never happened before.

What kind of support does that?

So the $1 million stimulus program is pretty much false advertising. Chances are, you won’t get it. Or you will. We are totally at their mercy.

Features: 4.1 / 5

If you are ever building an online store, once in your life time, you should use Magento Go. It simply makes sense.

After trying a few more online store builders, I think I’ll unsay the above saying.

Everything seems good, if not great. There are some parts that can be improved, such as the theming system, backup system, etc.

Their top plan for $125 / month offers a tingling of just 32GB monthly bandwidth. Anyone with decent SEO skills would easily hit that mark in half a year, especially if you’ve got lots of large images for the products. And extra bandwidth are charged $10 / GB. Pretty expensive. AND they don’t even have a bandwidth meter where you can see how much you’ve gone so far. So good luck…My tip is to use external website for hosting the product images.

Otherwise, Magento Go is simply NOT an . Be prepared to pay premium when you are locked in with them.

Support: 0.8 / 5

Appalling. If you are ready to pay $xxx per month for the top plan, you would probably be treated much better. But that’s just a theory.

I opened a total of 9 tickets, they DELETED 3 of them and responded to 3 of them.

They sent a very important message to *my* email. I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, not even close. How hilarious is that!

Ticketing system is very hard to use. You would view the message and then click “Back” to return to the previous page to reply to it – if you have to quote something, you click “Forward” to view the message sent to you and then click “Back” again to continue writing. Very user-UNFRIENDLY ticketing system.

I posted a “Problem” message to the collaboration site (a collaboration support community to help dilute the workload of the REAL support team) about how my SSL hasn’t been installed after paying $99 and why my tickets got DELETED in the ticketing system. You know what they did? They changed the “Problem” status to “Question“. You know, it doesn’t look pretty in red.

Quick Facts about Go’s Support

People love interesting facts. Here are them.

A total of 3 tickets that got NO responses and simply got DELETED:
1) A request for installing my SSL attached with my certificate files from GeoTrust
2) A request to be enrolled in the $1 million stimulus package they promised – $15 monthly discount for next 12 billing cycles
3) A question why my store home page doesn’t display the newest products after I added them in the backend – tried 2 different approaches but none of them worked.

After I complained about the SSL installation, they claimed to have sent an email to me at yanghit (@@@@@) gmail dot com. Apparently I didn’t receive it. Because that’s NOT my email, nor anything close.

For me, their support turnaround is about 12 hours, sometimes as long as 3 days, IF they respond at all. (I just recalculated the actual turnaround based on tickets’ and questions’ time stamps)

12 Hours Support Turnaround

Any support turnaround that’s 12 hours or longer is just unacceptable for mission critical sites such as eCommerce stores. Ordinary content sites have an eCPM of about $5 – $50 per thousand visits, however, online stores generally averages $200 – $2000 per thousand visits. Every hour of problem or down time causes substantial loss; the greater the traffic & conversion rate, the greater the damage.

People who choose Go are generally not technically oriented and would require a lot of help along the way. It would be a very painful experience for them should something get haywire yet they can’t get anything done in 12 hours.

Magento Go has got to seriously work on that.

Busted?

They got a final score of 60.5 / 100. Merely passed.

I will keep you updated on my experience with Magento Go. Even though their support isn’t the best in the world, I’d still recommend them to you. Hopefully they can see this review and give their support department a revamp.

I would love to see Magento Go becomes the go-to brand for online eCommerce solution. However, as of now, you would be better off with CE and do your own hosting, if you’ve got some technical nerves. In this case, I would like to recommend the Avalanche Magento theme.

Update: I submitted a ticket and a *problem* at the collaboration site asking for a refund of the $99 SSL setup fee and they finally got back to me, addressing a question I asked 23 hours ago. After a few more tickets (each taking 2 – 3 hours for them to respond), my SSL is finally up and working.

Curious how your shopping cart is now?
Also, do you have an actual phone number I can use to call them?
I want to know more about the stimulus program, ie: what is that their own program if so, can you tell us about it step by step.
And you mention they want a SSL certification from CA, what does that mean?
Look forward to your answers…..
Rebecca

Thanks for leaving the comment, Rebecca. Currently I’m with Magento CE, the community edition which I’m still playing with and it seems to be taking forever to learn it and customize it inside out; and the WordPress WooCommerce plugin which seems beautifully simple but adequately sophisticated for a decent online store. Magento CE runs a long way ahead of WooCommerce with regards to features and functionalities but WooCommerce is much much easier to use and customize, especially if all you want is a simple store with less than 1,000 products.

I don’t have any phone numbers of Magento Go. And don’t count on the stimulus program, you may or may not get qualified for the discount.

If you want a secure badge and HTTPS:// for your website, you need to purchase an SSL from a CA such as VeriSign.com and then provide the SSL to Magento Go for them to install it on your website.

MicahJuly 20, 2012 at 1:41 am

I must say I never thought I would have keyword searched “Magento Go Sucks” but as I sit here totally frustrated with my experience with Magento Go I at least feel calmed by knowing I’m not the only one.
Perhaps I should have researched using the above keywords before wasting my life with Magento Go.
Magento Go is not ready for prime-time as July, 2012. The extensions list is somewhere under 15 and there are several basic features not included; Gallery, Category displaying subcategories, NO Theme core access, lack of centralized category and product relationships, lack of auto sub-product creation. Overall a very rigid platform with very poor documentation within the admin panel. As rigid as it is there is no wizard or tutorial to guide you as you are in it.
I have worked with several e-commerce stores and CMS applications and this is by far the worst experience I have ever had. Magento Go forces you to jump through hoops with every customization, page creation, option/attribute, well just about everything requires jumping through hoops. I wish I never found Magento Go.

AliJuly 27, 2012 at 12:53 am

I see you mentioned you in a trial period, i agree with you on SSL installation for $99 which sucks.
The $1 million stimulus program kicks in after you launch your store by going through the steps they have in the admin panel.
The $1 million stimulus program kicked in for me after a month of launch, pretty happy about that.
Overall Magento Go is an amazing platform, there is a steep learning curve to manage the Admin side, but its worth it. I have over 500 products and i can configure it anyway which i want.

Overall its a 9/10 from me.

MartaSeptember 12, 2012 at 6:40 am

I have been using the Magento Community for 2 years now. I ran into many problems with customization. Recently I discovered Magento GO which gave me hope but reading all you guys have to say I’m no longer sure…with that said what would you recommendation for a e-commerce platform? (some one told me about OpenCart yes it’s easy to customize but functionality as far as processing orders i s much worse then Magento)….. any other ideas?

Recently I came across some great articles on your site. The other day, I was discussing (http://www.kavoir.com/2011/09/magento-go-test-drive-review.html) with my colleagues and they suggested I submit an article of my own. Your site is just perfect for what I have written! Would it be ok to submit the article? It is free of charge, of course!

MagentoGo SSL woes. It’s now day 8 and my SSL certificate (yes the one that I had already purchased) and Magento charged me $99 to install, still has not been installed.
Apparently the Ecommerce platform provider is having issues installing SSL certificates in their OWN system. So technically, there is NO Ecommerce to be had right now so this is a NOEcommerce platform.
I have contacted them about 8 times about this. Some tickets magically get deleted. So now I’m contacting them again to find where my SSL cert is and where my tickets are! Then they tell me the tickets were resolved. How can it be resolved???? My SSL Cert is still not installed. Right now they score a 1/10.

Dan SJune 27, 2013 at 3:19 am

I`ve been working with MGO going on 3 months. Ive had nothing but exceptional support. Make no mistake. To have a good looking and functional ecommerce site on MGO you need CSS/HTML/Design Experience. The out-of-the-box themes are terrible and the site will only be as functional as you make it.